Our offices were in a turret on the south side of the building. Our film editing room was on the fifth floor of another section of the building, so it was a long walk between the two. Late at night the return took me through halls where work lights illuminated shards of far-off tribes; long Read More
For a short time I had two offices, one at the Museum, the other at the CBS building. I was in an office next door to a man who never said hello and was constantly on the phone. His voice was low. The Cold War was overheated with threats of nuclear exchanges. Undercover, as a Read More
One of the most ambitious series-within-a- series was a four-part summary entitled, The History of Life on Earth. The guide was George Gaylord Simpson, one of the world’s leading paleontologists and the author of The Meaning of Evolution. Dr. Simpson began with fossil invertebrates seen under an electron microscope. With the aid of other curators Read More
One of the glories of the American Museum of Natural History was the Hall of Mexico and Central America. As part of the Adventure Series (1953-1955), we planned a lengthy segment on the films a staff archeologist had taken of Mayan architecture. He would then have a conversation with Frank Lloyd Wright, the American architect. Read More
At WBBM I was also assigned public interest “sustainers” or unsponsored programs. In the 40’s the commercial broadcasters were required to do public interest programming or face the threat of their license being given to someone else. A license to broadcast was a license to print money. Nevertheless almost nothing was spent on “sustainers.” I Read More
The fifth floor of the Museum housed the scientists’ offices and was also a storehouse of artifacts not on display. Margaret Mead had contributed objects from her work in Bali. While she and I were working out a script for the segment on Manus she pointed at something I had never seen. She called it Read More
When television was young—before the computer, the microchip, and editing cuts lasting less than a wink—CBS News did 136 broadcasts of Adventure, a documentary television series beginning in 1953. It was produced in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History and hosted by Charles Collingwood. Some programs had no commercials. The salesmen called Sunday Read More
A few days before I was fired, my novel The Friend was published and released in Chicago. A small book party was held at a bookstore around the corner. The reviews in the Chicago papers had been good, but the attendance at the party was spotty: nobody from the radio station showed up. I had Read More
I had done a script or two for WHA, the University of Wisconsin’s radio station. Live radio production was exciting. Tape had not been invented, and everything was done to precise time. The programs had to be exactly twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds long. I liked the anxiety, the deadlines, and writing scripts for children. Read More
I was the Chief Musical Producer at WBBM from 1948 – 1950. The musicians union required that WBBM keep forty full-time musicians on staff. Because I could read an abbreviated score, I became a pet of the musical conductor, Caesar Petrillo, brother of James Petrillo, the head of the American Federation of Musicians. Caesar had Read More